Secondary thermal cracks in EGS: A variational approach

We present a mechanistically faithful and mathematically sound approach to the numerical simulation of secondary thermal cracks propagation in EGS based on the variational approach to fracture [1-4]. While remaining compatible with classical theories, this approach provides a unified framework to crack nucleation, full path identification, including interaction between multiple cracks, branching or kinking in 2 and 3D. We present large scale numerical experiments, and compare our results with the literature.